Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's an honour to be here.
Last week, we met the Canadian team at the OSCE. I was really impressed by your delegation's level of access to information about the real facts of what is happening in Ukraine. It gives me a lot of hope that our joint efforts could bring those crimes committed in Ukraine to accountability in the future.
I want to start by introducing the International Partnership for Human Rights. We have investigated crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine since 2014, together with the local investigators from the Truth Hounds, an NGO. Our methods are very transparent. We try to verify each fact from at least three sources. We use open sources, satellite maps, testimonies of victims and witnesses and other sources that are available to us.
I want to emphasize that Ukraine and its citizens nowadays have critical thinking, and I want to emphasize that our people in Ukraine have started to treat living near hospitals or schools as being in the most dangerous places in the city. What I first want to draw your attention to is the intentional direct attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, arts, science, charitable purposes and historic monuments and against hospitals and the places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided that they are not a military object.
I have a lot of examples that we've documented of this violation and these crimes, but I want to give you an example of today's attack on the city of Mykolaiv, where those civilian objects have suffered. It includes one city hospital and a regional hospital, a centre for the prevention of diseases, an orphanage, 11 kindergartens, 12 schools, one vocational school and one branch of out-of-school educational institutions. They were all shelled today in one city, Mykolaiv. We have been documenting these kinds of indiscriminate attacks during all of the last months.
We want to confirm that you accept that these are intentionally directed attacks. The Russian Federation has used indiscriminate weapons in populated areas, with unguided or free-fall bombs, cluster munitions and incendiary munitions. I want to also mention that a lot of hospitals and schools were shelled a few times, which definitely shows their intention of shooting at these places directly.
I want to draw your attention also to the fact that most of their state workers and governmental representatives in Russia, including the state so-called journalists, before attacks on such places, very often—not only in Mariupol but also in Sumy and Mykolaiv—try to justify the targets by saying that there are troopers in the maternity hospital in Mariupol or there are some suspicious military vehicles on the territory of the hospital or school, which is never confirmed. We didn't find any testimony on that.
It is obvious that no matter how desperately the Russian side seeks to justify the inhuman attack by its armed forces on the maternity hospitals, schools and other protected objects, two things remain obvious: their manipulation of the facts and their lies about the reasons for the bombings.
Certainly, it is necessary to conduct a more in-depth investigation into all the circumstances of these attacks. However, at this stage there are already more than sufficient grounds to claim that the Russian side has committed a war crime, for which all those involved should be held accountable.
There are a lot of war crimes to be—